An Unlikely Super-Warrior Emerges in Afghan War

U.S. Combat Controllers Guide Bombers to Precision Targets

HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. -- Master Sgt. Bart Decker remembers riding
on horseback to the top of the highest peak south of Mazar-e Sharif in northern
Afghanistan in November and watching the Taliban flee in pickups and four-wheel
drives, their headlights illuminating the only road out of town to the
east.

It was almost too easy.

Flicking on his Global Positioning System receiver, Decker calculated
coordinates for either end of a narrow stretch of highway and radioed them
to B-52 bombers and F-16 fighters loitering overhead. Then he watched, horse
by his side, as bombs rained down from the sky, striking the vehicles and
killing their occupants with devastating precision.

Decker is an Air Force Special Operations combat controller, an unlikely
super-warrior. His core skill is air-traffic control and his most potent
weapon a Global Positioning System receiver available at the average electronics
store.

Yet, in a war driven by precise information about Taliban and al
Qaeda targets, Decker and other combat controllers, embedded in Army Special
Forces A teams, emerged as pivotal figures in the fusion of U.S. targeters
on the ground with precision strikes from the air, the conflict's most important
tactical innovation.

Gul Haidar, an Afghan militia leader who has fought against the Russians
and with the Americans, said the air-ground coordination was the key to the
victory by U.S.-led Northern Alliance forces last year against al Qaeda and
the Taliban militia that sheltered the terrorist network.

"The people with Special Forces controlling the jets are very effective
-- they really know what they are doing," he said. "It was American aircraft
that broke the front line of the al Qaeda."

Like Decker, four other combat controllers interviewed at Air Force
Special Operations Command headquarters here told dramatic stories of airstrikes
they called in during the early stages of the war, talking jets they could
barely see onto targets they had identified using Global Positioning System
satellite coordinates, laser beams or infrared pointers.

One controller, a technical sergeant named Calvin who did not want
his last name used, arrived in Afghanistan on Oct. 21 and called in airstrikes
for 25 straight days, averaging 10 to 30 per day.

On the 25th day, with Northern Alliance forces amassed for a final
assault on Kabul, the Afghan capital, and coming under heavy fire from more
than 1,000 Taliban fighters, Calvin called in the coordinates of a "kill
box" covering the entire Taliban front.

Minutes later, 27 2,000-pound Mark-82 bombs saturated the zone. The
ground shook, a two-story building serving as Calvin's lookout post began
collapsing from the shock, and all Taliban firing ceased. The final advance
on Kabul soon began, he said.

"When you roll in a B-52 and put those bombs exactly on their front
lines and spread that out for 300 or 400 meters long -- that's where you're
devastating the enemy and breaking their back," Calvin said.

Air Force Secretary James G. Roche said this fusion of Special Forces
on the ground and strikes from the air has the Air Force envisioning a much
greater air-to-ground role for its most advanced new weapon, the F-22 stealth
fighter.

In future wars, he said, the fusion will be enhanced by new devices.
These include Global Positioning System satellite receivers that load target
coordinates directly into guided munitions, smart bombs that use "terminal
guidance seekers" to lock onto moving targets and "small diameter" smart
bombs that will enable an F-22 to hit as many as eight targets and a B-2
stealth bomber as many as 216 on a single sortie.

Decker, 40, a native of McHenry, Ill., who joined the Air Force at
22 after a brief career as a construction worker, said most Special Forces
troops can "take one aircraft" and call in an airstrike. But combat controllers,
he said, can "rack and stack" half a dozen fighters and heavy bombers like
jetliners over a commercial airport before directing them to targets in rapid
succession.

"If you can't get them on target quickly, those [planes] go home
with ordnance -- and you've lost," Decker says. "That's air-space management,
and that's what we do best."

Decker's war on terrorism began in early October, when he took over
management of the control tower at Karsi Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan,
guiding in giant C-17 cargo planes within hours.

But it was the "terminal attack" skills of Decker and his fellow
combat controllers -- there are only 400 in the entire U.S. military -- that
distinguished them on the battlefield once the Special Forces A teams were
inserted into Afghanistan.

As the war wore on, the weapon of choice became the Joint Direct
Attack Munition (JDAM), a 2,000-pound bomb that is guided to its target by
signals from satellites.

The JDAM made its battlefield debut in Kosovo in 1999, providing
all-weather precision capability for the first time. Unlike laser-guided
bombs, a JDAM's guidance system is not impeded by cloud cover.

But without combat controllers and other Special Forces troops on
the ground in Kosovo, most strike aircraft could only take off on combat
missions with predetermined target coordinates.

The presence of Special Forces in Afghanistan made flexible targeting
possible, officials said, greatly reducing the amount of time it took to
identify and attack targets.

Instead of taking off with pre-programmed bombs, fighters and bombers
flew into Afghanistan and were assigned to specific combat controllers on
the ground, who gave them targets to attack.

"A JDAM allows you to target faster," said a combat controller named
Jason, who did not want his last name used. "I can hit six different targets
with six different JDAMs on one drop -- and it will totally shift the momentum
of the battle."

Combat controllers must understand the capabilities of every jet
in the sky and the blast radius of the different weapons they drop. In Air
Force parlance, every bomb has a PI factor -- short for "personnel
incapacitation."

For a 2,000-pound bomb, for example, controllers know that friendly
forces must be 500 meters away to ensure their safety. A 2,000-pound bomb
is so powerful that, even at 225 meters -- a distance greater than two football
fields -- the PI factor would be 10 percent, meaning that 10 percent of friendly
forces would be incapacitated for at least five minutes.

Another combat controller, a 27-year-old staff sergeant named Mike,
who also asked that his last name not be used, returned here from Afghanistan
with a whole new appreciation for personnel incapacitation. He was 50 feet
away from a JDAM detonation.

He had just called in an airstrike on Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners
during a riot at the Qala-i-Jhangi prison outside Mazar-e Sharif in late
November. But instead of entering the enemy's coordinates into the bomb,
a pilot apparently punched in those of Mike and other friendly forces
instead.

A Northern Alliance tank absorbed much of the impact. "I can't see
anything, I can't hear anything, my whole body is in shock from the explosion,"
Mike said, describing how the blast propelled him 30 feet into the air. "Before
I hit the ground, I thought, 'I'm probably dead right now.' "

Although the blast flipped the tank upside down and killed several
Northern Alliance fighters inside, Mike survived, suffering only scratched
corneas and perforated eardrums.

Not everyone was so fortunate. Tech. Sgt. John A. Chapman, a combat
controller, was one of seven soldiers killed in early March when a helicopter
inserting Special Forces troops during the U.S. offensive against al Qaeda
in the Shahikot valley came under fire. Another was shot on the battlefield
north of Kandahar in December and lost an arm.

Back in Special Forces training, Mike remembers the ribbing he took
when he arrived at Fort Bragg, N.C., for Army jump training. "You show up
as an Air Force controller and they say, 'What are you doing here?' " Mike
recalled. "We've always been the guys in the middle of the mix, the guys
no one really talks about -- until now."